“Ya’ll know what’s weird? Sometimes I have weird thoughts. Is that weird?”*

I seem to have nothing to say. No, really. I can’t get anywhere on this third book idea or even the idea I had for a fourth book – which involves planning for the holidays and should be easy-peasy – or blog posts. I’m doing good to get an email done.

What is up with this? I don’t get it and it’s a strange, unsettling feeling. The last time I remember feeling this way – sort of – was the month of August. That was a blue month. The book was at the printer and I felt foreign. It was an antsy, jump-out-of-my-skin feeling that was kind of awful. But even then I had no lack of whinage about it.

But this, this complete lack of topics of anything to say? I felt like this once before, the summer after my husband and I separated. I had nothing to say and even worse, I didn’t like my writing voice anymore. At all. I forced myself to draft the introduction to the summer section of More Culinary Kudzu. I gave it to a friend to read and kept asking what she thought of it. Finally, the night Katrina hit, Tillman and I were marooned at her house. Under much duress she admitted that she had actually read it, although she had told me before she hadn’t yet had time to, and, well, she didn’t like it all that much. It was too negative and complainy and angry. It made her not want to read any more of it as full as it was of bile and bitterness against…the heat and humidity that is a Mississippi Delta summer. So. There was that.

There has been no great upheaval in my home life over the last couple of months. Well, besides, Christmas. There was upheaval aplenty during December, which I do need to write about for that holiday planning book, while the agony is still fresh, as a writer friend urged me to do.

I’ve drafted something for this blog and have an idea for a couple of posts for my blog but still ya’ll. I just can’t seem to get with it. I know, I know. Listen to this whining. If I were reading this, my advice would be to just freaking write. It doesn’t matter – at all – if you don’t “feel” like it.

I think I’m still suffering the effects of an all too-busy autumn and holiday season. I also think I may require more time alone than the average person. My favorite kind of weekend in the world is not a whirlwind of fun and activities from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Rather, it is a long two days full of enticingly-empty blocks of time, so that I can stay in my house the whole time, perhaps working at the computer, perhaps reading, perhaps wasting way too much time watching The 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders on VH1, or perhaps getting a wild hair and dashing down to Jackson to spend a few hours at a bookstore, perhaps going to Oxford to sit on a friend’s patio and drink beer. Those are the kind of weekends – with all the choices and options – that I crave at least once a month. Call me indulgent and I won’t disagree. That’s just part of my makeup; I need that alone time. I haven’t had one of those weekends since September. Yeah, so. I blame my lacklustre everything as of late on that fact.

*Second-favorite line from The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing

UniverseDonna

Contrary to what my friend keeps telling me, I am too the center of the Universe, and if I’m having a problem with something, surely I’m not alone, and at least one other person is saying, yeah, I’m with ya’, baby, and one’s enough for me. Okay…I wrote 250 words or more a day for, u’mmmm, 15 days. Then life happened. Again. It always does. I did do a book review and edited some essays, but that’s not real writing like…like….like THIS is real writing. I also went to some doctors’ appointments with a friend, and there must have been something else I did? Not vacuum, sorry to say. And the dirty clothes are spilling out the bathroom closet door and also taking over the butler’s pantry. I think the Rent-Earner is running out of socks. I KNOW I didn’t play free cell, not even when my daughter called and talked for three hours and she had wine and I didn’t, because I gave up free cell last year, and even though I thought about it an hour and a half into the call, I wouldn’t let myself go there. Addiction, after all, is addiction. I haven’t given up e-mail, but I’m a woman and women need to talk five times as much as men, at least that’s what some research article said, and I mostly have a social group of two (me and him), three dogs and two cats, and, okay, I need it, the article said talk-talk goes straight to the pleasure center of a woman’s brain, which goes to prove men and women really are different, and the sex thing is really a lost cause as far as communication goes. He is going to fall asleep while you are not even close to finishing up with that pleasure center in your..what?...BRAIN. Silly Nature. Did I get lost here? Maybe, but I was enjoying the chat. So, back. No 250 words last week. And also so, I can shoot myself or jump back in the saddle. So so so this Monday, here are my words. Yes, this does too count, because I say.

Reporting In: When Writing Doesn't Pay the Rent

Flannery O’Connor once said something to the effect that she was guided by her muse to write, and her muse could find her at her desk, every day between 9 and 12. She also said the only award she really appreciated was the kind that could be cashed at her bank. If Flannery didn’t say something to this effect, some other renown writer did. If this is so, let me know who, but what I remember is what informs me, even if I remember it wrong.

I know that a schedule with writing honors the act of writing and provides me with the framework to actually get something said. No schedule…then each act of writing requires some more amount of energy than it would if I just said, “9:00. Write.” There are all kinds of questions I can ask: Am I hungry? Should I take a walk first? Who lives in this messy a house? I wonder if my sister is at home? Do I actually have something to say? Is writing just a silly hobby? Who would want to hear what I have to say? DO I HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY?

Feel a nap coming on?

If you have a job, and you wake each morning asking yourself if you should really go to work today, honey, you’re sunk. You hate your job, you hate your life, you are not sure about yourself, and even your dog is suspect. In order for a job to be tolerable, you have to make a commitment to it.

So, you make a commitment to writing, but it comes without a check at the end of the pay period. You can’t cash that commitment at an American bank? What happens next? What happens to me is that an emergency comes up, or I haven’t made an equal commitment to washing the clothes, and I run out of undies, or the kids are coming home, or a friend has a project that needs help. I’ll write when…when what? No time to write, just for today, or for a week. Months later, ‘urgent’ circumstances are still making inroads on what was supposed to be my writing time.

Here’s the rub. No rent money. No legitimacy. No continuity.

I’ve wanted to ‘be’ a writer since I was 8. I’m not sure why. I loved books, and maybe I thought writing would be a way of living with books, rather than going out into the world and doing other things like my parents did. Writing didn’t seem to have any connection with having anything to say, since I didn’t feel like I really knew anything. Still, the desire to write has simmered through my years like a low-grade fever.

The present simple tense of ‘to be’ is am. I want ‘to be’ a writer? That’s something in the future, and a heck of a lot of ‘need-to nows’ stand in the way of its arrival. I am a writer means also I am writing. Now. Here at 9:00 today.

Today marks one week of my 250 word commitment, though I’ve actually written more than that each day this week. Two weeks seems to be my wall. On the 15th day, Circumstances Arise. I am really curious how other writers, my friends and guild members, write. How do you do it? Are you scheduled? Do you get paid for writing? What's working or not working for you? Let me know.

TODAY'S LESSON AND THEN I WILL BE FREE

to grocery shop, wash clothes, vacuum.

Our January meeting of the GAMWG was in a noisy restaurant, and our group added to the clamor. I sat in the middle and often only rode the waves of sound. People were talking across from me, on either side of me, and others, not us, all round the room. Our group was diverse: two artists, two single mothers, a young person retired from the military, a retired business woman, a part-time postal clerk who had built her own home, four mothers, a teacher, four published authors, two novelists, one piddler, a construction worker. Eight of us wore many hats. What we had in common was all of us loved writing and none of us wrote to pay the rent.

The goals of the MWG are lofty and admirable. The joint goal of our own animated little group was to meet again next month, in a restaurant, albeit a less noisy one. After the tangled web of conversation, I am not sure if we agreed on any thing else, though we all seemed to leave still talking. I did hear some of us needed community. And encouragement.

Because here’s what happens if you do not write to pay the bills: writing can too often be laid aside. (Here I acknowledge some of our little group wrote like breathing, but publishing eluded them). So we begin new years and new groups with new goals. This year I will do it. But big goals often deflate, and groups grow stale and next year rolls around with instant and infinite regularity.

So I vow to begin. Just begin.Something doable before the groceries and laundry and housekeeping. Two hundred and fifty words a day. I am only 2,750 words behind since the start of the year. WAIT. I am not behind at all. There is only today. And I’ve already made today’s quota.

I would love to hear from other writers, members of the guild or not. Do you write for rent? Regularly? Sporadically? Tomorrow, at Tara? How’s it going this year, today? Encourage us by being part of our community. If you have a bit of time, blog on your writing schedule and let us post it here.

Now…on to the have to’s, but maybe I will be back to the computer today. For sure tomorrow, because it’s only a bit I have to write, and I did it today.(413)

How Writing Saves Me

Do you ever have those days, those times when you don’t want to write? When it’s more than a, “Nah, I don’t feel like it,” but more like an active dislike of the act?

That’s the way I felt today. It’s just been one of those days for no apparent reason. I’m discouraged about how the book is selling. I’m feeling overwhelmed about this other book project, one I had been looking forward to diving into after the first of the year. I’m battling feelings of, “What does it matter? Is it worth it? What’s the point?”

Okay, so maybe there are some apparent reasons.

At any rate, today I needed to work on the monthly enewsletter I do. And I did not want to. Like at all. But it kept nagging at me until I said, “FINE. I will write something but it won’t be any good. So there.”

And that’s pretty much what happened BUT I polished here and edited there and it’s shaping up to be okay. The payoff is that by pushing through and writing even when I wasn’t feeling the love, it made me feel so much better on so many levels. Has this ever happened to you?